International Encyclopedia of Communication Online

Extract

Truth is a slippery concept, and philosophers since Aristotle have battled over its meaning. The most intuitive and widely adopted understanding of truth is that of correspondence theory – the idea that “true propositions tell it like it is;” that “for a proposition to be true is for it to correspond to the facts” ( Blackburn & Simmons 1999 , 1). The correspondence theory assumes that the “truth” about a particular event or object is constituted by a set of “facts.” The more skillfully a phenomenon is described, the closer the description gets to the “truth” of it. Such a conception imbues media content and its makers with phenomenal authority, and is central to arguments about the importance of media professions. Along those lines, →  Walter Lippmann (1991 , 31) famously suggested that to create a correspondence between “the world outside” and the “pictures in our heads,” we need a battalion of responsible expert journalists to ensure proper “representation of the unseen facts.” Ettema and Glasser (1998) have pointed out that journalism's belief in correspondence theories of the truth is captured in the extensive use of metaphors of glass to understand and describe news: When we refer to the news as a “mirror of reality” or a “window on the world,” we assume that media content is straightforwardly referential; that there is a one-to-one relationship between the “true facts” ... log in or subscribe to read full text